Jake Page, Editor Who Made Science Accessible, Dies at 80

Jake Page, an editor and columnist at Smithsonian magazine who brought the wonders of science to a general audience in dozens of books, and who channeled his interest in the Indians of the American Southwest into a series of popular mystery novels, died on Wednesday at his home in Lyons, Colo. He was 80.

The cause was vascular disease, his daughter Lindsey Truitt said.

Mr. Page made it through high school and college without taking any science courses but found himself cornered when, as an editor at Doubleday in the 1960s, he was put in charge of an imprint called Natural History Books. “My job was to edit them so that any idiot could read them,” he told an interviewer for his most recent publisher, Rio Nuevo. “I was any idiot then for the next seven years.”

He spread his wings at Smithsonian, where, in an easy, elegant style leavened with humor, he contributed articles on topics as varied as Zane Grey, the Hollywood makeup artist Michael Westmore, the history of aspirin and the blind anthropologist Marsha Ogilvie while writing a monthly science column, “Phenomena, Comment and Notes.”

“My monthly column began as a way of propping open the ads in a young magazine and evolved into an attempt to trick people into reading about science by means of humor,” he once said. “Science, which always seems earnest to the point of stuffiness, is too important to leave only to scientists.”

His many books dealt with earthquakes, dinosaurs, arctic exploration, zoos, the languages of cats and dogs, and, beginning in the 1980s, the history and culture of the American Indian.

He was introduced to that subject by Susanne Anderson, a photographer who, in 1973, had just completed “Song of the Earth Spirit,” a book about traditional Navajo life in Arizona. Intrigued by the book, Mr. Page asked her to write an article about Navajo witchcraft. The article did not materialize, but when the Hopi asked Ms. Anderson to document their tribe, permitting photographs for the first time since the early years of the century, Mr. Page retired from the magazine to assist her. The two married soon after.

At the request of a Hopi chieftain, Mr. Page wrote an article on the theft of four sacred artifacts from their ceremonial hiding place. When Smithsonian and Connoisseur both rejected the piece — for fear, he said, of offending certain museums and galleries — he turned the material into a mystery novel, “The Stolen Gods.” Published in 1993, it was the first of five books featuring the blind sculptor and detective Mo Bowdre and his half-Hopi girlfriend, Connie Barnes. The series ended in 1996 with “The Lethal Partner.”

James Keena Page Jr. was born on Jan. 24, 1936, in Boston, and grew up in Chappaqua, N.Y., where the family moved after his father graduated from Harvard Law School. He attended the Gunnery, a small prep school in Washington, Conn.

After earning a bachelor’s degree from Princeton in 1958, he enrolled in the Graduate Institute of Book Publishing, a short-lived venture at New York University in which students did course work in the morning and worked afternoons at a publishing house.

Mr. Page served his apprenticeship at Doubleday, which hired him, after he received his master’s degree in 1960, as an editor of Anchor Books, its trade paperback imprint.

“Most memorably, the editor in chief of Anchor shot down my notion that we should publish a fascinating trilogy by an English author, so the whole billion-dollar Hobbit enterprise was taken on by Ballantine,” Mr. Page told the interviewer for Rio Nuevo.

“My boss said Hobbits were not appropriate for a publisher of books for college students,” Mr. Page said, referring to J.R.R. Tolkien’s series “The Lord of the Rings.”

In 1962, Mr. Page was put in charge of Natural History Press, a joint venture between Doubleday and the American Museum of Natural History that also gave him responsibility for Natural History magazine. “This all put me into the middle of the natural sciences, ecology, conservation and mainly the intellectual delights of biology and anthropology,” he told The Journal of American Culture in 2003.

After serving as editor in chief of Walker, a small publisher, he took the job of science content editor for Smithsonian, a startup at the time. The job set him on a new course dedicated to popularizing science.

His columns for Smithsonian and Science were collected in “Pastorale: A Natural History of Sorts” (1985) and “Songs to Birds” (1993).

With Eugene S. Morton, he wrote “Lords of the Air: The Smithsonian Book of Birds,” and he collaborated with the geologist Charles B. Officer on several books, notably “The Big One” (2004). Subtitled “The Earthquake That Rocked Early America and Helped Create a Science,” it described a seismic event in New Madrid, Mo., in 1811 so powerful that it rang church bells in South Carolina, changed the course of the Mississippi River and swallowed entire towns.

After “Hopi” was published in 1982, he teamed up again with his wife on “Navajo” (1995), a tribal portrait. In “The First Americans: In Pursuit of Archaeology’s Greatest Mystery” (2002), written with J. M. Adovasio, Mr. Page explored one of the great unanswered questions of North American history: Who were the continent’s first inhabitants, and where did they come from?

His most ambitious work on the American Indian was “In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000-Year History of American Indians” (2003), a compendium covering the histories of some 500 tribes.

His most recent book, “Uprising: The Pueblo Indians and the First American War for Religious Freedom,” was published in 2013.

An obituary on Sunday about Jake Page, an editor and columnist at Smithsonian magazine, misstated his marital history. He was married twice and divorced once; he was not married three times and divorced twice.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 24 of the New York edition with the headline: Jake Page, Editor Who Made Science Accessible, Is Dead at 80. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe